Louise Zamparutti
Universities of Wisconsin Fellow (2025-2026)
Associate Professor, English, UW-La Crosse
Monument in Motu: The Positionality of Place
This book project interrogates the popularity of fascism through an in-depth study of the Foiba di Basovizza, a recently established memorial in northeast Italy. The memorial was initiated by Italy’s far-right political parties to memorialize Italian Fascists and collaborators that were killed by Yugoslavian partisans in World War II. Initially controversial, the memorial has now achieved widespread bipartisan acceptance and mass popularity in Italy. I incorporate scholarship that engages with new materialist theories and the concept of positionality developed and defined by Alcoff (1988) and Jones, Moore, and Walton (2016). Incorporating these theoretical angles, I am developing a theory of object-relation positionality to observe the ways that affective engagements with the monument continually shift and to analyze this move from the controversial to the mainstream. My research methods combine site visits and personal interviews with examination of historical scholarship, popular media, and public discourse such as political speeches, news sources, and social media interactions. Through this analysis, I hope to offer a new way to examine how extremist thought and action can become appealing to wide audiences.
Louise Zamparutti is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, specializing in Rhetoric. Her research incorporates scholarship and theories from material rhetorics, memory studies, and identity construction. Her work has been published in interdisciplinary journals including Research in Social Change, Rhetoric Review, Romance Studies, and Human Remains and Violence, and she has contributed to the edited volumes A Century of Italian War Narratives (Brill, 2023) and Covid Communications: Exploring Pandemic Discourse(Springer, 2023). Her stage play, Identità/Identiteta, was produced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and taught in contemporary drama courses at the University of Ljubljana, and is planned to be performed in her hometown in northeast Italy in 2026. She has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Scholars, Fulbright, the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency, and the American Association for Italian Studies. Her current book project analyzes the interaction of material memory artifacts and the rising global popularity of fascism through an in-depth study of a recently established national memorial in northeast Italy.
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